The Inkblot is Maybe the Window to the Soul AND CONTEST RESULTS!

Wow. That's all I can say. When I decided to do a contest, I was crossing my fingers for 30 entries. You guys are AWESOME. Welcome to all the new folks who hit the follow button either here or on Twitter, and thank you to all of you who have been with me a bit longer. This was really, really fun.

I tabulated all of your entries (76 of you entered, but with all of your Tweeting and linking and clicking, it made for 205 total entries) and went to http://www.random.org/, and within a few seconds, I had winners! So here they are:

1. Winner of the $30 Amazon Gift Card: HELENE DUNBAR
2. Winner of the Three-Chapter Critique: LEXCADE
3. Winner of the Psychologisty Reading Pack*: ROSIE C

*Carolyn Kaufman's The Writer's Guide to Psychology and Scott Lilienfeld (and colleagues') 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology (I HIGHLY recommend both these books, and if you want another chance to win Dr. Kaufman's book, here it is--contest ends 5/7/11)

Congratulations to the winners!

Now: the inkblot. Here's the history: The Rorschach was developed by Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach in the early 1920s. He noticed that some children in the psychiatric hospital in which he worked had substantially different responses to a game called "Blotto". He published the Rorschach test in 1921 and advised some caution in its interpretation, stressing that his findings were preliminary. Unfortunately, he died just one year later.

Other psychiatrists and psychologists took up the mantle, some even calling it a "psychological X-ray", enabling professionals to see into the deep recesses of a patient's unconscious. It makes psychologists and psychiatrists sound pretty darn powerful, doesn't it? WE CAN SEE INTO YOUR SOULS, PEOPLE! But then, researchers got hold of it and the criticism began--the scoring was so subjective that no one could be sure it actually revealed anything.

In the 1970s, psychologist John Exner attempted to rescue the Rorschach, developing a standardized system of scoring to increase the reliability (and credibility) of the test. Exner's "Comprehensive System" is pretty complicated. It doesn't just score for content (which is what most of you were concerned with as you made your comments in the contest) -- it goes a lot further than that.

The Rorschach includes 10 inkblots, some black and white, some black and red, and some full color. You're not supposed to publicly display the actual test inkblots because if people who take the test have seen the test materials ahead of time, it could influence their responses. For each card, the examiner hands it to the person and asks "what might this be?" Then the examiner writes down everything the person says and does. The person actually goes through the cards a few times, and the final time, the examiner asks some questions to make sure she understands how the person is seeing the blot.

Here's my inkblot again--do you still see the same thing?

What's scored:

1. Location--the examiner codes which part of the inkblot the person uses to form his response. For example, two of you focused on white space around the blot, but many of you gave responses based on the whole thing.
2. Determinant--what quality of the blot was used to form the response. An example would be that 17 of you gave responses that could be coded for movement because you said you saw "dancing" humans or animals of some type. Many of you gave responses solely based on the form of the inkblot only, and some of you gave responses based on both the form and the color.
3. Content--this is the actual content of the response, which can be coded into 27 categories. For example, many of your responses would be coded for human or human mythological content, either whole or detail (that includes all the goblins and demons), and there were even more animal or animal mythological responses (like the dragons). Some of you gave responses including anatomy (skulls, pelvises), art (the Grecian urn), explosions (of a piece of food, oddly enough, Dr. Kang). Only one of you gave a sexualized response (I'm looking at you, Mr. MacNish ... but I suspect some of you were holding back).
4. Popularity--there are some responses that are commonly given for certain cards, so in this category, the examiner codes whether the person's response was one of those. Of course, your responses were the FIRST EVER to this magnificent inkblot, so you can review the comments and see if your response was similar to many others (there were lots of angry goblin/demon faces and lots of dancing animals)
5. Organizational activity--the examiner actually codes how the person synthesized the various parts of the inkblot to form a coherent response (or not). This sucker is complicated to code and I'm just not going to get into it in this post. I'll touch on it Wednesday.
6. Form Quality--the extent to which the response "fits" the inkblot. I'd say nearly all of you gave a response that fit the blot at either the superior or ordinary level.

All right, I'd say this is just about long enough. On Wednesday, I'll talk more about the interpretation of the test results, as well as some of the controversy surrounding this particular test (um, there's A LOT).

Since it's Monday, please go check out Lydia's Medical Monday post, as well as Laura's Mental Health Monday post.

In addition, please go visit Justine Dell's blog. She was my very first crit partner, and while I was in Indiana, I went to meet her in person for the first time (she lives in Bloomington, IN). She's posting about it today ... along with some pictures (this may come as a surprise to some of you, but I'm not actually a stick figure with 18-inch-long fingers). I don't really deserve the things she says about me, but what she writes about how fun and amazing our day was--that's absolutely true.

So ... back to the Rorschach. What do you think--is it scored how you expected? More complicated? Less? I haven't even started to talk about how to actually interpret it--are you intrigued or bored? Is it as mysterious as it seemed last week, or does it seem more mundane?